Exxon Mobil Cleanup Effort Continues on Brooklyn Spill

One of Exxon Mobils filtration units in Brooklyn treating the badly contaminated waters of Newtown Creek.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

Inside the walls and barbed wire fence that largely hides the nondescript facility beside Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, a handful of trailers sit in a cluster surrounded by smaller buildings that belong to Exxon Mobil.

It is not much to look at, but Exxon Mobil officials say the operation is slowly eliminating the contamination that has been deep underground in the Greenpoint neighborhood for decades. The operation, and the contamination, stem from an oil spill that occurred more than half a century ago and has been described as more than twice as large as the Exxon Valdez disaster, which released 11 million gallons of crude oil off the Alaskan coast.

The Brooklyn spill, which resulted from an industrial explosion in 1950, released an estimated 17 million gallons of oil and oil products, polluted the soil, left traces of toxic chemicals in Newtown Creek, led to years of community and environmental outcry and became the basis of several continuing lawsuits.

Nearly eight million gallons remain beneath the Exxon Mobil property and nearby properties along Kingsland Avenue, though the contamination cannot be seen or smelled. How long it will take to get rid of the remaining material is unclear. “We’ll be here until the job is done and done right,” said Barry Wood, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil.

The company uses two water treatment facilities for the work. Both churn hour after hour, sucking up about 450 gallons a minute of polluted water, filtering out the crud and then spitting it back into the creek in a much cleaner form.

Eleven oil recovery wells outfitted with pipes, some as deep as 50 feet in some places, gather oil from the ground, which is then recycled. Five of the recovery wells have above-ground holding tanks, while the other six are underground. Some of the tanks can hold 2,000 to 4,000 gallons of oil.

Workers in hard hats supervise the cleanup effort, making sure the computers that control the recovery wells are running smoothly. It is largely a silent operation, no rumbling machinery, no shouted orders.

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Exxon Mobil officials said it planned to add 10 more oil recovery wells by 2009.

The company began its cleanup efforts in 1979, Mr. Wood said, and has accounted for 6 million of the 9.5 million gallons of oil and oil products that have been removed from the water and the ground.

Two other companies, Chevron and BP, which own property near Exxon Mobil and have also been accused of being responsible for polluting the neighborhood with industrial waste, have a similar cleanup process under way.

Earlier this year, the New York attorney general’s office halted the cleanup of the water because of concerns over how the contaminated water was being treated, Mr. Wood said. The work resumed after about four months when the process was declared satisfactory by the city’s Department of Environmental Conservation, he said.

The recovery of the underground oil contaminants continued uninterrupted, though at a slower pace, he said. The toxic contaminants include oil, benzene, arsenic and lead. Soil tests have revealed that the spill has released toxic vapors in the neighborhood.

Despite its cleanup effort, Exxon Mobil remains under scrutiny. It was one of five companies cited in a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general’s office on Tuesday seeking to compel a faster cleanup. The other four were BP, Chevron, KeySpan and Phelps Dodge. Two other lawsuits resulting from the spill, one filed by Riverkeeper, an environmental group, and another filed by local residents, are pending.

Alex Matthiessen, the president of Riverkeeper, said the cleanup process was insufficient. “For far too long, Exxon Mobil has done the bare minimum to address the very serious environmental impact,” he said.

The article on July 19 also referred incorrectly to an agency, the Department of Environmental Conservation, that reviewed Exxon Mobil’s water cleanup operation this year. It is a state agency, not a city one. The articles on July 18 and July 19 referred incompletely to soil tests taken to determine whether the spill has released toxic vapors into the neighborhood. Although previous tests, conducted by the Riverkeeper environmental group, showed the presence of such vapors, the most recent tests in residences in the area, conducted by the state, were negative.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Exxon Mobil Cleanup Effort Continues on 1950 Spill. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe